Saturday, October 27, 2012

A
modest protest last Sunday marked a year since the forceful eviction of
Occupy Melbourne protesters from City Square on 21 October 2011. Robert
Doyle, an enthusiast for the eviction who had looked down imperiously on
the police horses and more than 100 officers from a balcony of
Melbourne Town Hall, will soon learn if he has been successful in his re-election bid for Lord Mayor.

Clouded by allegations he has refused to fully answer about campaign funding, an unrepentant Doyle again seeks the
top job with a Federal Court judgment in the offing over whether the
City of Melbourne and Victoria Police acted unlawfully and breached the
rights of the protesters whose eviction he sought a year ago.

For the anniversary protesters, however, thoughts about Doyle’s
continuing bid for power came with more humble reflections about what
Occupy continues to represent.

Early on, a mere handful of people
gathered near Spring Street on the lowest steps of State Parliament.
Just a couple of Protective Services Officers patrolled their upper
reaches, but there were no police save for a Critical Incident Response
Team van that swung by and continued without apparent interest down
Bourke Street.

Was this less the anniversary of a movement than its funeral parade?
Would the scene be set for media coverage that would see the numbers as
a vote for or against the value of Occupy as a whole?

A year on,
with many of the global economic and social justice issues that have
concerned the movement only worsening, and with the Sydney coronial
inquest into the police tasering of Roberto Laudisio Curti, it would be a
mistake to conclude that low numbers could possibly signal irrelevance.

Instead, they would, if anything, signal the challenge of sustaining
a disparate movement amid what Noam Chomsky described in July as an
“atomised society” where “people are kind of alone, and not by
accident”.

Speaking to Gary Younge of The Guardian, Chomsky noted “very
large-scale, coordinated, planned efforts to try to restore people to
apathy and obedience”. Since Occupy, however, he said that activism had
only grown. It was, Chomsky said, a movement of different aspects and
strands.

And so it was last Sunday, as the small group at State Parliament was
joined by a further group marching up Bourke Street, bearing a black
cardboard coffin painted with the words “RIP Doyle” in a hopeful signal
of the Lord Mayor’s political demise.

If a sign was sought of the movement’s continuing importance, it was
seen in what followed, in the reaction of PSOs to a muted - indeed,
funereal - protest on a quiet Sunday afternoon in Melbourne.

The
PSOs conferred, radios were spoken into, and police began to gather -
two vans at first, and five police officers standing aloof from
protesters now lining Parliament’s upper steps with photographs and
signs protesting police violence, the coffin at their feet as a funeral
dirge floated mournfully in the air.

A PSO confers by radio upon the arrival of Doyle's coffin atState Parliament

When the protest finally moved off for Melbourne Town Hall, the
front and rear of the march were bracketed by police cars, the flanks by
officers on foot. This was not so much a safeguard against negligible
public risk than it was a will to set the parameters of the march, to
mark the limits of its confinement by authority.

In this, the scene brought to mind Chief Commissioner Ken Lay’s comments
about such protests distracting police from the
prevention of robberies, burglaries and assaults. In what ill-conceived world
is constraining peaceful protest a higher priority than such crimes? Was
this in any sense meaningful law enforcement?

At the Town Hall the police numbers grew to eight, with five cars
ranged along the kerb, across the road and around the corner. The coffin
was laid beneath the very balcony where Doyle had witnessed the actions
of police last year - the regular and special operations officers, the
horses, and all the standard armoury now too often deployed towards
compliance with police demands aligned questionably to the actual law.

There was a sadness at this protest, but not over its worth among
the protesters. Instead, there was a pervasive sense that in a democracy
police should not create confrontation in order to resolve it through
the use of disproportionate and unnecessary force. We could have been
mourning Roberto Laudisio Curti, or Tyler Cassidy.

The protest at a Flinders Lane police station is well-monitoredby police and CCTV

We ended our protest at the police station off Swanston Street in
Flinders Lane. Protesters chalked the road and made their final speeches
as police sergeants conferred on the footpath. The filming of
protesters with an officer’s smart phone now presumably fell to the CCTV
cameras bristling from the station itself.

In the aftermath of the October 2011 eviction, Radio National’s
World Today program reported one protester’s words about the state of
modern society, if not all who live within it: “We’re trained to see
differences between each other; we can’t see what makes us similar
anymore”.

Fortunately, one year on from the Occupy Melbourne eviction, and on this day unshaken by police violence, we could
be more hopeful. We could still see and share what joins us all.

This post represents my personal views. I did not attend the original Occupy protest evicted from City Square and do not speak for the Occupy movement. I have participated in a number of subsequent protests as an ordinary person supportive of Occupy's aims.

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